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in the long run to Flee, or even to simply hide, than to fight the bastards on anything even vaguely resembling their own terms.
    Our ten-day registration campaign had focused almost entirely on the Head/Dropout Culture: they wanted no part of activist politics, and it had been a hellish effort to convince them to register at all. Many had lived in Aspen for five or six years, and they weren’t at all concerned with being
convicted
of vote fraud—they simply didn’t want to be hassled. Most of us are living here because we like the idea of being able to walk out our front doors and smile at what we see. On my own front porch I have a palm tree growing in a blue toilet bowl ... and on occasion I like to wander outside, stark naked, and fire my .44 Magnum at various gongs I’ve mounted on the nearby hillside. I like to load up on mescaline and turn my amplifier up to 110 decibels for a taste of “White Rabbit” while the sun comes up on the snow-peaks along the Continental Divide.
    Which is not entirely the point. The world is full of places where a man can run wild on drugs and loud music and firepower—but not for long. I lived a block above Haight Street for two years, but by the end of ’66 the whole neighborhood had become a cop-magnet and a bad sideshow. Between the narcs and the psychedelic hustlers, there was not much room to live.
    The idea of asking young heads to “go clean” never occurred to us. They could go dirty, or even naked, for all we cared ... all we asked them to do was first
register
and then
vote
. A year earlier these same people had seen no difference between Nixon and Humphrey. They were against the war in Vietnam, but the McCarthy crusade had never reached them. Atthe grass-roots of the Dropout Culture, the idea of going Clean for Gene was a bad joke. Both Dick Gregory and George Wallace drew unnaturally large chunks of the vote in Aspen. Robert Kennedy would probably have carried the town, if he hadn’t been killed, but he wouldn’t have won by much. The town is essentially Republican: GOP registrations outnumber Democrats by more than two to one ... but the combined total of both major parties just about equals the number of registered Independents, most of whom pride themselves on being totally unpredictable. They are a jangled mix of Left/Crazies and Birchers: cheap bigots, dope dealers, Nazi ski instructors, and spaced-out “psychedelic farmers” with no politics at all beyond self-preservation.

    At the end of that frenzied ten-day hustle (since we kept no count, no lists or records) we had no way of knowing how many half-stirred dropouts had actually registered, or how many of those would vote. So it was a bit of a shock all around when, toward the end of that Election Day, our poll watchers’ tallies showed that Joe Edwards had already cashed more than 300 of the 486
new
registrations that had just gone into the books.
    The race was going to be very close. The voting lists showed roughly one hundred pro-Edwards voters who hadn’t showed up at the polls, and we figured that one hundred phone calls might raise at least twenty-five of these laggards. At that point it looked like twenty-five might make the nut, particularly in a sharply divided three-way mayor’s race in a town with only 1,623 registered voters.
    So we needed those phones. But where? Nobody knew ... until a girl who’d been working on the phone network suddenly came up with a key to a spacious two-room office in the old Elks Club building. She had once worked there, for a local businessman and ex-hipster named Craig, who had gone to Chicago on business.
    We seized Craig’s office at once, ignoring the howls and curses of the mob in the Elks bar—where the outgoing mayor’s troops were already gathering to celebrate the victory of his handpicked successor. (Legally, there was nothing they could do to keep us out of the place, although later that night they voted to have Craig evicted ... and he is now running